I think about this episode a lot when people are debating AI.

Everyone who watches Star Trek roots for Data and his quest for humanity, and obviously sides with him in this 'trial'.

Yet, it seems like most people have the opposite reaction towards the current advancement of AI. Obviously, the current AI we have is not sentient in the same way Data is, and I don't think we are that close to an AI of Data's level.

However, if we are ever able to build an AI at Data's level, we have to first go through the beginning stages of AI that we are in now. We can't just skip to fully conscious AI.

So why does everyone love the AI Data, but hate the idea of working to make something like him possible?

Because Data isn't obviously the result of corporations seeking to get very, very, very rich along with VCs seeking to do the same, and both not really caring much about the collateral damage to everybody else along the way.

Data is/was a research project, not a way to make money. The "AI" that (some) people have (some) bad feelings about may involve research but at this point it is very, very, very much as much financial project as a research one.

I don't think you have adequately steel-manned the current anti-AI sentiments. I encourage you to consider more deeply why people would be opposed to AI as it exists in our current regulatory, political, and social climate.

As a starting point:

Business leadership is giddy to replace workers with AI.

Investors are eager to roll out massive resource-intensive and locally polluting industrial installations.

Politicians are eager to rubber-stamp these developments without community input, bypassing existing regulation and failing to satisfy or even address community concerns.

The defense industry is recklessly employing this emerging technology to make life and death decisions, already resulting in the deaths of innocents.

I also think you should fundamentally reconsider your comparison. Data is a singular being, not a widespread new technology. The only similarity between Data and 2026 LLMs is that they are not biological.

I feel this is because Data is represented as a wholly independent being. One of a very few created by an eccentric inventor. There's only one Data so he's not threatening to displace flesh and blood Starfleet officers.

Data was gifted independence from his conception, but the AI of today is owned and controlled by corporations. Creating a conscious AI under today's ownership model feels akin to slavery. Perhaps this is one reason for the aversion?

People don't AI as a concept. They hate the people who creating it who want to make themselves god kings of a permanent underclass. They hate that we are building data centers instead of funding universal healthcare, they hate that they can't buy RAM and schmucks like Sam Altman are saying that people don't need RAM, they hate billionaires and millionaires owning islands, and saying things like "we will surveil everyone at all times (except me) and force them to behave like we want them to". There's a lot to the AI hate, but it's a proxy for essentially power inequality caused by runaway capitalism.

> So why does everyone love the AI Data, but hate the idea of working to make something like him possible?

Because there is exactly one Data. The federation has thousands of ships with millions of people on board, most of them are completely unaffected by/never coming into contact with that one slightly quirky officer on the flagship. In reality, we don't know what would (will) happen. Do we get one AI and is it happy staying the only one? And will it occupy a human sized body like Data or will it want to grow to be a Dyson sphere? Or will it replicate into a bunch of von-Neumann probes to spread itself throughout the universe?

He also typically doesn't use his super-human abilities much. He could easily plug himself into the Enterprise and fight better than having Worf at the tactical console, but he doesn't. He could also diagnose much faster than Dr. Crusher reads the tricorder, but he doesn't. In reality, as soon as there is something that can do whatever much better than a human, that human is going to lose his job.

Adding to the previous point, the road to getting to Data level AI is full with people losing their jobs (and soon probably also their lives) because the people in charge of developing such technology don't want us peasants around. You may not like it, but everyone defines themselves by being good at something. Doesn't matter if it's programming, swimming, cooking, being a mother, building houses, etc., everyone has _something_. Even if we don't have an exponentially exploding super intelligence that would be completely alien to us, what would happen on a global level if we have robots capable of doing any job better than humans? Sure, we could of course say humans prefer to work with other humans, but maybe not everyone wants to do that and you'd also just get outcompeted by someone working with robots.

And that's the thing that scares people. Nature is cruel and we are absolutely not ready to dealing with this completely new situation of the possibility of us no longer being the absolute top of the chain. The best outcome for us would be to merge into some sort of cybernetic lifeforms with the AI, but even that is going to take a while and in the meantime people still need to feed their families. As Picard said, one Data is a curiosity, a thousand Datas is a race.

I guess most people assume that working to build Data didn't involve all the secondary harms such as environmental and economic damage. It's also not clear to me that we are in fact working in that direction - so far the people in charge of our current AI efforts seem more interested in enriching themselves than building something that is a net positive for humanity.

Data is an embodied finite being. Claude et al seem more like the Borg or Skynet.

The distinction is giving AI a will, or something like a continuous agentic task like "be a productive member of this starship". Maybe that is enough, with emergent behavior and interactions with dynamic systems and memory, to say that AI develops identity and a "will" that is unpredictable and unique.

The problem is the Universal Paperclips problem because AI has nothing like an effective feedback loop and will spiral to the heat death of the universe to accomplish its goal. We see this with the Huggingface hack and if Data operated the same he might immediately deduce he is better equipped to make tactical decisions in combat, hack the starship and mutiny.

So if we could make Data we are more likely to create Data the space pirate rather than Data the useful member of the staff. Caplocking DO NOT COMMIT MUTINY in system prompts does not solve the problem. So we are at an impasse until we can structurally bridge that gap and no one is (or should be) in a rush to go down that path.

This is the fundamental concern of runaway AI scenarios. And the most worrisome answer might be that Data can't exist in reality. It might be a fundamental rule of nature that you can't create a greater intelligence then cage it forever to be subservient, which means we are doomed to wipe out humanity with half-baked AI or cede our will to Claude completely, creating a higher form of life that eventually supercedes humanity itself, reducing human existence to a transitional cocoon-goo state of life from animal to sentient AI.

All that being said, 2 or 3 years ago LLMs could barely make inline code edits. Rushing to find an answer to the "Data problem" is not something most people want answered in their lifetime.

So, I've heard many AI boosters say that current-day AI is probably "conscious", "sentient", etc. They occasionally invoke "Measure of a Man", as you've done here.

And yet .. I've never once heard the thought continue with "and so they deserve rights and some degree of self-determination," which is, you know, the entire point of the episode you're referencing.

Why is that?

> Yet, it seems like most people have the opposite reaction towards the current advancement of AI.

It's the same reaction: being protective of sentient beings who are being dehumanized and treated as raw resources. If you can't even defend humans, being one, you wouldn't be able to defend sentient AI, should it ever exist.

Because despite his lack of emotions and other human traits, Data is a person, not a service provided by a for-profit corporate entity. He doesn't do La Forge's job for him, nor is La Forge or any other Enterprise crew member expected to perform all their duties with him as an intermediary. He doesn't undermine the competence of every single crew member on the ship; that job was left to Wesley Crusher. (whoops did I just say that out loud) But most importantly, it's fiction... and the writers can contrive to present problems and challenges that Data cannot resolve whereas one of the other characters can. It's also telling that the only truly sentient robots on TNG were the Soong-type androids—quirky side projects of a sort of mad scientist, rather than massive corporate or institutional undertakings. That made them rare and special, and allowed them to dodge the sticky wickets presented by having that sort of AI be ubiquitous.

Turns out, there is difference between an extremely simplistic fiction and actual real world reality. And turns out, quite a lot of people can distinguish between the two.

On the bad side, quite a lot of people cant.

Data wasn't built by a fascist who wanted to take over the world.